EVENTS AND REUNIONS FOR 2 012/13 ISSUE 12 MICHAELMAS 2012 GONVILLE & CAIUS COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE Michaelmas Full Term begins . Tuesday 2 October Development Campaign Board Meeting . Thursday 11 October Caius Club London Dinner . Saturday 20 October Caius Foundation Board Meeting . Tuesday 30 October New York Reception . Tuesday 30 October Patrons of the Caius Foundation Dinner . Tuesday 30 October Commemoration of Benefactors Lecture, Service & Feast . Sunday 18 November First Christmas Carol Service (6 pm) . Wednesday 28 November Second Christmas Carol Service (4.30 pm) . Thursday 29 November Michaelmas Full Term ends . Friday 30 November Varsity Rugby Match . Thursday 6 December Lent Full Term begins . Tuesday 15 January Development Campaign Board Meeting . Wednesday 20 February Second Year Parents’ Hall . Thursday 14 & Friday 15 March Lent Full Term ends . Friday 15 March MAs’ Dinner . Friday 22 March Annual Gathering (1981, 1982 & 1983) . Friday 5 April Telephone Campaign begins . Saturday 6 April Hong Kong Dinner for Members of the Court of Benefactors . Monday 8 April Hong Kong Lunch . Tuesday 9 April Kuala Lumpur Reception . Thursday 11 April Caius Club Cambridge Dinner . Friday 12 April Easter Full Term begins . Tuesday 23 April Stephen Hawking Circle Dinner . Saturday 18 May Easter Full Term ends . Friday 14 June May Week Party for Benefactors . Saturday 15 June Caius Club Bumps Event . Saturday 15 June Graduation Tea . Thursday 27 June Caius Medical Association Dinner . Saturday 29 June Annual Gathering (up to & including 1961) . Tuesday 2 July Admissions Open Days . Thursday 4 & Friday 5 July 1973 Ruby Reunion Dinner . Sunday 15 September Annual Gathering (1993, 1994 & 199 5). Saturday 2 1 September Michaelmas Full Term begins . Tuesday 8 October ...always aCaian The New Master Remembering Iain Editors: Mick Le Moignan, James Howell Editorial Board: Dr Anne Lyon, Dr Jimmy Altham The Benefactors’ Wall Design Consultant: Tom Challis Artwork and production: Cambridge Marketing Limited Gonville & Caius College Trinity Street Cambridge CB2 1TA United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)1223 3396 76 Email: [email protected] www.cai.cam.ac.uk/alumni Registered Charity No. 1137536 ...Always a Caian 1 D a n W From the Master h i t e I am writing this foreword in the final days of my term as Master. The movers have been and gone, and Julia and I are camping in one room of the Lodge as the decorators prepare for the arrival of my successor. But outside, the College is preparing for a new academic year: new names are painted in staircase doorways, returning students are beginning to trickle back, and I can hear distantly the assiduous practising of the new organ scholar in Chapel. College life goes on, as it always does, and my last task is to Conten ts complete a smooth handover to my colleague and successor, Sir Alan Fersht. C Y a o o u r It has been a privilege and a great pleasure to serve as Master. I leave the Master’s L t i e a s n y g o Lodge and Cambridge, but not the College, as I become a Life Fellow and look forward f B B to a continuing association with an institution I have come to love. 2 8 12 C A Cambridge college is a subtle, complex little organism, and it has been an intriguing task to serve as its head. Our key aim is a wonderful and intangible one, to promote education, learning and research. That must always be our priority. But there is also a financial bottom line – budgets to balance, buildings to repair, funds to allocate. Resolving the tensions between these aims is a delicate business. I have much enjoyed the stimulating company of the Fellowship – tough debate in College committees, wide-ranging conversation at High Table. The students have been Y J a a joy – sparky, multi-talented, unbelievably energetic. The College is served by a loyal a m o e L s i a H n g and efficient staff who do unobtrusive wonders to keep the whole complicated show o w e l on the road. 16 22 34 l I have seen it as an important part of my job to represent the College to the wider Caius, the thousands of Caians scattered across the world. At Annual Gatherings, in the Caius Club and on my travels to New York, Hong Kong and elsewhere it has been heart-warming to learn how much the College continues to mean to so many. The generosity of our many benefactors, large and small, is vital to the continuing health of our College, and on my departure I send them my heartfelt thanks. I am left with no space to do justice to this new edition of Once a Caia n... But it seems to me that the Contents page opposite – covering among other things College history, memories of a much-loved Fellow, world-leading science, art history on 2 The New Master television and the sporting achievements of our current students – in itself 6 A Sermon in Stone – new studies of John Caius encapsulates the range and variety of life at Caius that I have found so memorable as 8 Remembering Iain Macpherson (1958) Master. Enjoy! 10 A Caian Survivor by Professor John Mollon (199 5) 12 A Colourful Cultural Historian – Dr James Fox ( 2010) 14 One for the road? – Dr K J Patel (198 9) 16 The Benefactors’ Wall by James Howell (200 9) 20 With a Little Hel p... by Dr Anne Lyon (20 01) Sir Christopher Hum 22 Looking East – Malaysia & Hong Kong Master 24 Thanks to our Benefactors 30 A Warm Welcome – Paolo Pace and his team The Caian tradition of philanthropy continues 32 CaiMemories to shape the future of our College 34 Back on Top – Caius Boat Club 36 College Port Offer and Recipes from the Caius Kitchen The College has chosen to celebrate the Cover Photos by Mastership of Sir Christopher Hum (2005) by Neil Grant and Simon Maddrell (1964) commissioning this portrait by David Cobley. 2 Once a Caian... ...Always a Caian 3 N e i l G r a n t rofessor Sir Alan Fersht FRS I made as an undergraduate to the In 1978, Sir Alan was “surprised” to be (196 2), who succeeds Sir Fellowship. The Fellows were so helpful appointed to the Wolfson Research Christopher Hum (2005) as and kind, from my rather gruff Tutor, Professorship of the Royal Society, in Master of the College in October Dr Charles Goodhart (193 7), to the succession to Dorothy Hodgkin. He held this 2012, is one of the most Dean and Chaplain. I was interviewed by Professorship for ten years at Imperial Pdistinguished scientists in the world. Iain Macpherson (195 8) and he always College, London, and then was invited to A recipient of the Gabor, Davy and Royal stopped for a chat when he saw me. return to Cambridge as the Herchel Smith Medals of the Royal Society, he is also a “The biggest revelation was Professor of Organic Chemistry, “a position member of the three major US academic that you could argue with your for which I had not applied, as I was very societies, the National Academy of Sciences, Tutor and persuade him to happy in London.” the American Academy of Arts and Sciences change his mind by intellectual “Fortunately, I decided to accept the and the American Philosophical Society. debate! This was something I was offer and move back to Cambridge, where Sir Alan, who was knighted for services to not used to at school, where a An impressive array of chess trophies. I was immediately offered a Professorial protein science in 2003, is known principally teacher’s word was law and unchanging, Fellowship at Caius, much to the annoyance for his important pioneering and continuing like the law of the Medes and Persians, of my daughter, Naomi, who, three months work in the field of Protein Engineering, in which altereth not!” ( Daniel 6 : 8). Caius transformed earlier, had accepted a place to read which new proteins are developed for use in Sir Alan married Marilyn Persell, a Medicine here! But it all worked out well and academic research, biotechnology and History student at King’s College, London, my life, from the she is now married to another Caian, therapeutics. while he was a research student at Caius. Professor Alister Hart (198 9).” Born in Hackney in 1943, his parents They began their married life at Newnham friends I made as an Sir Alan was also awarded the moved to North Chingford, where he Cottage. Lady Fersht was Chair of the ‘‘ Directorship of an inter-disciplinary research attended the local county primary school Cambridge Decorative and Fine Arts Society centre, the Centre for Protein Engineering, and was the only student to pass the 11-plus (CDFAS) and is currently Secretary of the undergraduate to and for the next 20 years, his research work examination, earning him a place at the Sir University’s Newcomers and Visiting Scholars went from strength to strength. George Monoux Grammar School in Group, which helps newly arrived academics the Fellowship Sir Alan and his colleague and Walthamstow. and their partners and families to settle in collaborator, Sir Gregory Winter, are generally Sir Alan says he has “always been a and find out more about life in Cambridge. considered to be the founders of Protein scientist”, having started to work out the They have two grown-up children, Philip Engineering, after their first experiments in basis of electrical circuits at primary school, and Naomi (198 8). 1982. By coincidence, Sir Gregory was when wiring the Christmas crib. The Sir Alan stayed at Caius to do a ’’ recently elected to the Mastership of Trinity fascination increased at Monoux and at the PhD under the supervision of College, in succession to Lord (Martin) Rees, age of 11, he persuaded his father to buy him Professor Tony Kirby (195 6), who is “and we look forward to being neighbours a huge collection of chemical apparatus and still a very active Life Fellow of the and cementing the well-established somewhat lethal chemicals for experiments The New College.